Announcing the Office you love, now on the iPad

Today in San Francisco, we made some exciting announcements about our company’s mobile first, cloud first approach. Office played a big part in today’s news. Over a billion people on the planet use Microsoft Office to get more done at work and at home. Every day we hear from you how important it is to have a great productivity experience on all the devices you use. We take that very seriously – we know that means you want the authentic experience of Office, made right for the device you’re using. Whether you’re creating an Excel spreadsheet on your tablet, authoring a Word document in the browser or making edits to a PowerPoint on your phone, you want the great Office experience you love, everywhere you are. Today, we unveiled Office for iPad® – specifically Word, PowerPoint and Excel. But this isn’t simply Office on another device. We thought a lot about what people want to do when they’re on their tablet, iPad functionality, and touch-first when we were building Office for iPad. We reimagined Office on the iPad, while retaining what people love about Office. We hope you’ll be as pleased with the results as we are. In the future, we will bring Office apps to the Windows Store and other popular platforms. In addition to Office for iPad, we’ve gone a step further in our mobile first and cloud first approach, and like Windows Phone, we’ve now made Office Mobile for iPhone and Android phones available for free. You can read more about how we’re expanding Office across devices below.

Office for iPad

We know you’ve been wanting it, and starting today, you can download Word, Excel and PowerPoint for iPad from the App Store. The apps have the robust capabilities and familiar look and feel that is unmistakably Office, while offering a fantastic touch experience built from the ground up for iPad. With the free versions of the apps, you can read your Word documents, view your Excel data and present with PowerPoint. Your documents will look as good as they do on your PC and Mac®, and better than ever on your iPad. With an Office 365 subscription, you can edit and create new documents with the iPad. When you edit a document, you can be sure that content and formatting will be maintained across Office on PC, Mac, tablet and phone. And, you always have access to your up-to-date documents in OneDrive and OneDrive for Business.

Your Office 365 subscription not only gets you the Office for iPad apps installed on up to 5 tablets, but also 5 copies across Office for your PCs and Macs. With one subscription all of your devices are covered, so you can work the way you want.

Office Mobile for iPhone and Android phones free

Just like Office Mobile for Windows Phone, we are making Office Mobile for iPhone and Android phones free for everyone. With Office Mobile, you have the ability to view and edit your Office content on the go. Office Mobile is available in the App Store and Google Play.

Office documents look better than ever on iPad. They look just as they do on your PC or Mac. In Word, images, tables, SmartArt, footnotes, equations are all there, perfectly formatted. Formulas, charts, sparklines, conditional formatting, and filters in Excel help you make better decisions. PowerPoint presentations pack a punch with transitions, animations, speaker notes and much more. When presenting, you can even use a built-in laser pointer, pens and highlighters to get your point across.

A familiar Office experience designed for iPad. What makes these apps unique is that they strike just the right balance between being unmistakably Office and being designed for the iPad. If you use Office on a PC or Mac, the iPad apps feel very familiar, so you are comfortable and confident using these apps right away. The Ribbon layout and experience is familiar, with the most common commands under Home, and Chart commands automatically show up when you select a chart.

At the same time, these apps were created from the ground up for iPad. The large touch areas on the Ribbon and in overlay menus make it simple to create, edit and format documents using only touch. Resize and rotate objects like pictures with touch-friendly handles. When you hold and move the objects, text flows smoothly around them. No keyboard and mouse required. You can even use iPad features like voice dictation to draft a Word document or AirPlay® to project a presentation wirelessly on a TV screen.

Edit, create and collaborate with confidence. When you edit documents with the Office for iPad apps, you can be sure that you won’t lose any content or formatting. Documents will look exactly how you intended in Office on PC, Mac, tablet and phone – regardless of which device you used to make the edits. Moreover, the apps have a remarkably rich feature set to create beautifully designed documents.

In addition, the apps make it easy to work together. Simply share your content with others thanks to OneDrive and then work simultaneously with multiple people on the same document or presentation. And, reviewing documents is now great on the iPad. Word documents can track changes, have threaded comments and easily accept or reject edits all right on the iPad.

Made for the cloud and Office 365. Since people want to be able to get things done everywhere, the apps are seamlessly integrated with Microsoft’s cloud services. The apps let you access up-to-date documents in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint. It’s easy to pick up from where you left off, because the apps know what documents you were working on last, no matter what device you were using. Even if you don’t have an Internet connection for a while, you’ll still be able to work on the documents you’ve recently used on the iPad.

Frequently asked questions

Q: How much does Office for iPad cost?

A: You can download the Office apps for free and read, view and present documents, spreadsheets and presentations. To get the full editing and creation experience, you need an Office 365 subscription. Office 365 gives you always-up-to-date versions of Office across your PC, Mac and iPad, and much more.

Q: Can I try Office for iPad?

A: Yes, you can read, view and present documents, spreadsheets and presentations for free. To get the full editing and creation experience, you can sign up for a free 30 day Office 365 trial at www.office.com/try. Then download the Office for iPad apps in the App Store. During your trial period, you can use Office across your PC, Mac and iPad.

Q: What Office 365 subscription plans include Office for iPad?

A: Office 365 Home, Office 365 Small Business Premium, Office 365 Midsize Business, Office 365 E3 and E4 (Enterprise and Government), Office 365 Education A3 and A4, Office 365 ProPlus, and Office 365 University. The new Office 365 Personal will also qualify when it becomes available later this spring.

I have a student subscription to 365 but my student email is not linked to my iPad Apple ID so it won’t let me register. I have tried 3 separate support calls and no one can help. Anyone have a solution?

When I first opened Word for the iPad, it came up with a wizard that it wanted me to step through. Choose the option that says view for free, then you will see the shopping cart icon in the lower left hand corner. From there, you will get the option to enter your credentials for an existing Office 365 account. Once I entered my credentials there, it actually activated my Word, Excel, and Powerpoint installations so I only had to do it the once in Word.

Honestly I was really looking forward to have Office on my iPad. But after buying
Office for Mac for 270€ I shall pay another 100€/ year to be able to edit my document on my iPad? What about an in app purchase to enable editing without an Office 365 subscription?

But here’s the disappointing thing. You have to go up the subscription levels to get multi-factor authentication.

MFA is pretty much standard in any decent web service – Google Apps, Evernote, Dropbox to name three obvious competitors. Why isn’t this kind of basic security pervasive throughout Microsoft rather than being a sell-up option?

It is good to see that MSFT has finally created / released this for the iPad. I have already heard several users here at work now saying there is no reason not to support or use iPads at work. As I also already had a subscription to Office 365, it was not at all clear how I could get my subscription to work with the new apps. But, I figured it out. As to the comment from the user with a Surface Pro 2, you are meant to use the full blown version of MS Office. That is why the Surface Pro 2 can run full and actual Windows Apps. That is also why the Surface and Surface 2 do come with their Office apps as part of the package so no one is getting messed over here. Except maybe those on Android tablets.

So why should a surface pro 2 not have a touch version of office? Yes we can use the normal office but sometimes an interface designed for touch is better. For example the touch onenote app is more useful for note taking etc.

in sure android will be next as Microsoft seem keen to help these “Toy” operating systems become useful rather than working on its own products

Hi ruzzy, I am Guy and I am a product manager for Office on tablets and phones.

Office 2013 on Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 are a solid combination. When you use the Surface with an attachable keyboard and mouse, you can use the full feature set of Office as you would on a laptop. You can use Office side by side with other applications, attach additional monitors and other peripherals. When you use Surface as a tablet, the Office UI adjusts and becomes touch-friendly. And you can use the Surface Pro 2 pen to write on Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Surface users have been very happy with Office on their devices.

While yesterday’s news was about giving our customers a great Office experience on iPads, we are committed as ever to continue to innovate on Windows and bring touch-first Office apps to Windows tablets.

I signed up for the Office 365 small business trial… but of course my iPad is telling me “Cannot Activate: This account doesn’t have a paid Office 365 subscription. Try a different Microsoft account, or buy an Office 365 Home subscription”

Not all is well yet with this obviously…. would have thought these issues would have been worked out already.

Apparently the Office Small Business Premium trial doesn’t work with the iPad apps, but the Home version does. Go figure. I signed up for the home one on top of the business one and it started working. Seems a bit odd, since my P1 Exchange Online plan won’t let me add a Home subscription. Too many options, as usual.. .home, home plus, business, small business, extra large business, enterprise home, home enterprise plus, hold the cheese pickle onion…

Microsoft – you are doing the right thing with Office for iPad and Mac, but you gotta learn to slim down your license and subscription models.

I’m able to open a word document from another into the new office word app, but not vice versa? Why I’m not able to open the word document I created in another app like dropbox, printer or custom mail application?

I have an MSDN Subscription, and have activated my Office365 entitlement, which gives me ‘Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise E3 Developer (MSDN) 1 Licenses’ but neither the user I setup using the Office365 registration process or my MSDN Microsoft ID allows me to use the iPad apps.

Two ways to print. Send your self a copy via email to Apples Mail app, print from there. The second way to print is save your file to the cloud, OneDrive, open the document in Office Web App, and print from there…

I agree, there should be a print option in Office iPad apps. Maybe printers are going to way of CDs and DVDs?

Sure hope not. Still have folks who send pix & stuff I’d like to see in print. Guess I’ll hold off buying into the Office suite until the next version comes out….& keep using Pages on my iPad. Works ok, for most of what I do.

I have a business subscription to 365 (A3) but my iPad is telling me “Cannot Activate: This account doesn’t have a paid Office 365 subscription. Try a different Microsoft account, or buy an Office 365 Home subscription”; In my iPhone the office app works with that subscription… Why iPad don’t ?

Hi Danguita, I am Guy and work for Microsoft.
Do you still have the same issue? You should be able activate the Office apps with your Office 365 A3 account.
If you still have an issue, feel free to contact the Answer Desk at http://support.microsoft.com/contactus.

Feel free to try Excel for iPad for 30 days with a free Office 365 trial (www.office.com/try). The trial also includes the latest versions of Office for PC and Mac.
By the way, the $9.99 per month includes Office on 5 PCs or Macs and 5 tablets, which is interesting for families. Shortly, we will also offer Office 365 Personal for 1 PC or Mac and 1 tablet for $6.99 per month.
If you happen to be a student, there are even more affordable options available. Hope that helps.

Thanks for the response Guy… My problem is that I have MS Office that I previously purchased on my home computer and my work computer has MS Office provided by my employer. So, I only need Office on my iPad (and maybe my wife’s iPad). Compared to other solutions, $10 a month is just too expensive for a product that I’ll only use on two iPads.

Hi Guy, I am with Blue here…I already have paid licenses for 2 Win and 1 Mac laptops. Why should I pay yet again for 365 just to use the apps on my IPad? Just doesn’t make sense/cents. All the more reason why I am using Google cloud based apps now. You guys are going to have to do more to catch up if you want to keep us as customers. My entire 5000+ empl organization is moving to Google this month to replace Exchange. The writing is on the wall for Office.

Hi, I downloaded the apps and subscribed to office 365 from in-app purchase of iPad. However, when I am trying to login to office 365 in my mac, it is not accepting the sign-in. I thought I could use the office apps in Mac based on my office 365 subscription from iPad. How do I do that? Do I need to download any applications at my Mac? Thanks

Hi Sajid,
Thank you for downloading the apps and subscribing to Office 365.

You should do the following: on your Mac, go to http://www.ofice.com/myaccount and login with the same email address and password you used when you purchased Office 365. You will land on your account page and you’ll be able to install Office for Mac from that page.

Hello Guy –
I have the apps on my iPad now and a year’s subscription. I’m still learning how they work, but am pleased with what I’m discovering, except…
I’m very disappointed that I cannot access my Dropbox files through these applications. I have decades of files in Dropbox and have to refer to them regularly. The only way that I can do this now is by e-mailing individual files to myself which is simply not workable on a regular basis. I know that Office 365 comes with its own cloud-based service, which probably works well, but there is no way for many people like me who have been using Dropbox as a central hub for working on documents across multiple devices to get true functionality out of these applications unless you can build Dropbox access into them. Until you can offer that, these applications are going to be of very limited use and hard to recommend.
Thanks for listening.

Same here, long time MS supporter. and office 365 early adapter… excited to finally enjoy office apps on ipad (which is what office 365 misleadingly promised a while ago with a half baked ipad app)… and still can’t enjoy the functionality on a practical level because I am heavily invested in dropbox… which in my opinion, is a superior and more universally accepted cloud solution than onedrive.

I installed the apps on my iPad, performed the in app purchase for Office 365 Home and all worked well. I hadn’t realized I needed to go to my Office.com account to install 365 Home on my laptop (which also worked well). This may not be the correct place to ask but what about Office 365 for Android tablets (i.e. is there a version that will be ready soon)?

One critical feature that is still missing from an otherwise great product is outline view. It would be wonderful to be able to effortlessly navigate large documents by, say, swiping left to right to open an outline view containing multiple heading levels.

This would be useful in other products too, especially OneNote, where in the current version if you have more than ten or so tabs (sections) in a workbook you have to swipe right to left to go through them, and the new section control (plus sign) doesn’t show up until you get to the end.

I’m trying to write a novel with 50-some chapters, and the iPad’s lack of this feature is all that is keeping me tethered to a netbook with an old version of Word running on Windows 7.

Thank you for the suggestions, kosterkamp.
I came up with a workaround involving a table of contents at the beginning of the document, in combination with a little known touch gesture . Let me know if you’re interested.

I also have an issue concerning dropbox. I’m afraid it isn’t feasible, even if I wanted to, to disentangle my life from dropbox right now. It is on everything. And it is what enables connection with many ipad apps which know nothing of onedrive.

Is there *any* way I can combine dropbox with Office for iPad? Is it save to install both onedrive and dropbox on the same machine pointing to the same directories????

I am a little frustrated right now. I have a P1 Subscription (more than a home sub) yet it is not allowed as part of this for full user, while all others seem to be. This does need to be corrected. If I add more licenses to my P1, the cost per year will be way more than even the Home sub. Microsoft, please allow a P1 subscriptions. I can download office and other tools to my laptop and use your tools on phones and tablets but you restrict me from using it on an iPad. I have Offce365 Small Business and it should be included.

Any hope for help with Dropbox, which seems a common concern? Guy? Bueller? (I have onebox inside Dropbox now, but with onebox only on one machine to avoid sync wars. Is this safe? Is there a better way?)

Hi John, thanks to MS that you came along with this solution! A great add-on to my E3 subscription!
Two things I have problems with.
1. When using E3 and a @outlook.com account I have some troubles with the access to files. E.g. I edit and save a document on the laptop (OneDrive), but can not access it again via Word for IPad. If I open it via the OneDrive for IPad app it’s working proper. The login account (IPad Word) is a E3 account. Is this still not supported to have a private and a company account?
2. Account (user) image is not shown, when logging on with the E3 account to IPad Word. If I log on with the @outlook.com account the image shows up correctly. Will you fix this?
BR, Fritz

Hi Fritz, I am a product manager for Office for iPad. Great to hear you like the new add-on to your O365 subscription.

1. In Word for iPad (and the other apps), you can sign in with one Office 365 organization account and one personal Microsoft account (e.g @outlook.com) at the same time. And you should see documents from both in your list of recent documents. Did you add your @outlook.com account as a connected service in the iPad app?
2. Thanks for bringing that to our attention. We will look into it.

I have an MS Word document with an 3rd party word app linked to it. I can use that word app on Word 2013 desktop edition. Is this supported to work in the iPAD native app as well? I tested the latest iPAD native app but couldn’t find the option to insert a word app or use the one linked with my uploaded word document.

Because of my employer, I paid for a “Home Use Program” license for Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 (valid for installation on two PC’s). I also have an iPad and I installed your new OneNote and PowerPoint – though I thank you for making OneNote fully usable with just an msn or live MS account, I can only VIEW in PowerPoint because I am not an Office365 subscriber. I ask that you would please enable iPad office editing for those of us who already purchased Office 2013 through the HUP. There is no reason for us to purchase the full suite twice. Thanks!

I also purchased the HUP and don’t understand the need to purchase a monthly subscription for something I already own a full license for. It would be convenient to use office on my iPad but not worth the extra cost. This pricing plan is great for someone who doesn’t have office at all (as long as the program automatically updates on all devices for as long as you have the subscription).
Why has no one from Microsoft answered any of the concerns from individuals who already own licensed copies of office 2013? Is there any concern with keeping loyal customers? I am seriously considering the google products since Microsoft doesn’t seem inclined with answering or addressing these concerns from their customers.

Please tell me that 3rd-party cloud storage providers (Dropbox, Google, etc.) are being considered for “save file” support. I can understand locking users into OneDrive under the free model, but when paid Office 365 subscribers can’t save files to Dropbox with these apps…wow, just, wow. Add that support and these apps will be a home run; otherwise they’re still just little league.

All this support for Office 365 but not for the companies that spend 100,000’s of thousands of dollars in VLK licensing for 2013 office and software assurance. Sure makes me think about using Google docs and ditching office across the entire company when you screw over your highest paying loyal customers with this garbage.

I was very excited about this announcement, and I’m more impressed than I thought I would be with Excel for iPad. It supports a lot of important features including data validation and conditional formatting (features lacking in Excel for iPhone). I’ve only tested a few of my spreadsheets in Excel for iPad, but I like what I’m seeing so far.

I can finally be done with using the Numbers app on the iPad! It is SO much easier to just create XLSX files and have them work on whatever device I happen to be using. The integration with OneDrive is superb.

One thing that I would really like to see is the ability to drag a row to a new location, or at least when you Cut a row and then select another row and choose Insert Above, it should insert the row you just Cut.

What is the best place to look for support around these products? We’ve installed on several devices in our environment and none can ‘Share’ a file either as a Link or E-mail directly from the device. (All are installed under our enterprise O365 accounts.) Thank you!

This feels like a big step towards the ‘digital workplace’. With SharePoint in the cloud, or secure access to SharePoint via the internal network or VPN, I can do my Word editing / outline drafting wherever I am now, without the laptop.

I especially like how all the Microsoft apps on my iPad somehow share log-ins – once I was signed in to OneDrive, my account automatically appeared in Word – or did I dream that? Magickal!

I think the variety of accounts and ‘types’ of office can be confusing (OneDrive, OneDrive for Business; O365, Enterprise O365 etc.) and I guess some people will pay for a personal Office 365 account and then try to use it inside the enterprise. Connecting to SharePoint is easy enough: http://www.clearbox.co.uk/connecting-office-for-ipad-to-sharepoint/ which is nice, and really does empower the digital workplace.

Hi former team – Wondering about something and can’t find any info about this particular issue: : I bought Office 365 for my company and as I often use my iPad at work, I sintalled Office for iPad when it came out. However, when I try to activate Office for iPad, I get this message:

“This Office 365 plan doesn’t incude editing. If you need to edit,. contact your organization, or sign in to the app with a Microsoft account and buy an Office 365 Home subscription.”

Obviously I’m not going to buy a subscription since we already have one (and pay plenty for it. Does this indicate that enterprise subscribers can’t edit Office 365 apps for the iPad? Is so, that’s kinda nutty… Thanks!

Disappointing release. I have been waiting and hoping for a microsoft word app for the ipad that is actually from microsoft. I don’t even mind paying $99 a year to use the app if it works. Unfortunately, without a easy print feature (because sometimes you still need to print) and dropbox functionality (because I need my files to no be bound up in a proprietary cloud platform) this app falls into the rest of the unhelpful and cumbersome word apps currently available.

If this changes I will buy if not…well I am not waiting with bated breath. So disappointing

Another question: Office 2014 for mac is coming this year. Did this include a version of VISIO and Project too? Visio would be very great, there is no good alternative on mac. can you say something about this??